WTF - Is White Tea?

Each issue, Caffeine answers those questions you thought were too silly to ask. In Part 3, to kick off our tea special, Hannah Ruth gets to grips with white tea

- Hannah Ruth

What comes to mind when you hear the word “tea”? PG Tips, builder’s, Earl Grey, milk and two sugars? That’s the limit of many people’s knowledge of the beverage. But tea is like wine; there are different types, processing methods, flavours, growing regions and seasons. All teas are made from the leaves or leaf buds of Camellia sinensis, but that one plant produces a fantastic range of teas, broadly separated into black, green, white, oolong and pu’er.

White tea is the least processed of the varieties, which means it has the lightest and most delicate of flavours. The leaves used tend to be the newest on the bud, and most still have white silvery hairs (or trichomes), which give the tea its name. Some blends are made with only unopened leaves; others are made with one or two of the newest leaves with a bud.